“Make A-meme-rica great again!”: Studying the memers among Trump supporters in the 2020 US presidential election on Twitter via hashtags #maga and #trump2020 by Huu Dat Tran B.S., Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City, 2018 A THESIS submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF SCIENCE A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications College of Arts and Sciences KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY Manhattan, Kansas 2021 Approved by: Major Professor Jacob Groshek, PhD. Copyright © Huu Dat Tran 2021. Abstract The study, consisting of three parts and based on the theoretical framework of social network analysis, political spamming, and framing theory, analysed a corpus of 220,336 tweets from 96,820 unique users posted on Twitter between October 27 and November 2, 2020. It investigates the participation of social media, particularly Twitter, and internet memes in political discourse, positioning such concepts in the political context of the 2020 US presidential election. The study attempts to better understand Donald Trump, his community of supporters, and their political discourse and activities during the 2020 US presidential election; thus, an investigation into their Twitter social network should prove fruitful. By probing into the community of supporters of the incumbent Donald Trump, specifically the group of internet memers (an internet slang describing people who create or distribute memes), on Twitter during the 2020 US presidential election, the study reveals the most active and influential users within the network, the likelihood of those users being spamming bots, and their tweets’ content. Such analysis is relevant in understanding Twitter users related to the hashtags, their affiliations, and the nature of such accounts. Systematic, objective, and quantitative content analysis of internet memes found in the corpus should determine (1) the memes’ target, (2) how were the targets portrayed in the memes, and (3) the main themes, or ideas, of the internet memes posted within the community of Donald Trump supporters. Finally, findings shall be discussed, from which assessment, prediction, and serviceable data are provided in the hope that the study can contribute to building a solid foundation for future research concerning internet memes, social media, and political communication. Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ iv List of Figures ...................................................................................................................... v List of Tables ....................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................vii Dedication........................................................................................................................ viii Chapter 1 - Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 - Literature Review ............................................................................................ 6 2.1. Memes and internet memes ................................................................................. 6 2.2. Characteristics of internet memes ........................................................................ 7 2.3. Internet memes in political discourse ................................................................ 10 2.4. Political participation on Twitter ........................................................................ 13 Chapter 3 - Theoretical Framework .................................................................................. 17 3.1. Social network analysis........................................................................................ 17 3.2. Political spam ...................................................................................................... 19 3.3. Framing theory ................................................................................................... 22 3.4. Research questions..............................................................................................25 Chapter 4 - Methods .......................................................................................................... 27 4.1. Data collection and study objectives ................................................................... 27 4.1.1. Part 1: Exploring the community of Trump supporters on Twitter ............. 27 4.1.2. Part 2: Identify the memers ......................................................................... 28 4.1.3. Part 3: A content analysis of the internet memes ....................................... 28 4.2. Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset (TCAT) ................................................... 29 4.3. Gephi .................................................................................................................. 30 4.4. Botometer ............................................................................................................ 31 Chapter 5 - Data analysis and results ............................................................................... 34 5.1. Part 1: Exploring the community of Trump supporters on Twitter ................... 34 5.1.1. The users ....................................................................................................... 34 5.1.2. The content .................................................................................................. 48 5.2. Part 2: Identify the memers ................................................................................ 61 5.3. Part 3: A content analysis of the internet memes .............................................. 63 Chapter 6 - Discussion ...................................................................................................... 71 The hierarchy of Donald Trump ................................................................................ 71 The problematic nature of bot detection ................................................................... 74 Memetic political discourse in the 2020 US presidential election ............................ 77 Chapter 7 - Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 80 Chapter 8 - Limitations and future research ................................................................... 83 Appendix A - Codebook ................................................................................................... 104 iv List of Figures Figure 1. Hillary Clinton's tweet, which is an internet meme, was the second-most retweeted political message of 2016 and Twitter's representative for the hashtag #Election2016 .............................................................................................................. 1 Figure 2. Distribution of tweets and unique users mentioning #maga or #trump2020 between October 27 and November 2, 2020 ............................................................ 34 Figure 3. A social network graph by mentions of 1,197 nodes (users) and 4,406 directed edges (mentions); a dynamic interactive version with higher resolution and more details can be found here ........................................................................................... 47 Figure 4. Word trees for “maga” and “trump” (Wattenberg & Viégas, 2008) .................. 51 Figure 5. A social network graph by hashtag co-occurrences of 2,628 nodes (hashtags) and 104,492 undirected edges (co-occurrences); a dynamic interactive version with higher resolution and more details can be found here ..............................................53 Figure 6. A bipartite social network graph by hashtag-user co-occurrences of 5,212 nodes (3,672 users, 1,540 hashtags) and 48,396 undirected edges (co-occurrences); a dynamic interactive version with higher resolution and more details can be found here ............................................................................................................................ 59 Figure 7. A picture wall consists of 120 memes collected from the subset of 33,558 tweets containing either the hashtags #maga or #trump2020, and posted between October 27 and November 2, 2020 ........................................................................... 64 Figure 8. Examples of the types of political memes ........................................................ 65 v List of Tables Table 1. Bot scores, evaluated by Botometer, for the 10 most followed Twitter accounts as of May 2020 .......................................................................................................... 32 Table 2. The top 100 most active users ............................................................................ 36 Table 3. The top 50 most mentioned users ....................................................................... 41 Table 4. The top 50 most retweeted users ....................................................................... 43 Table 5. The top 50 most used hashtags .......................................................................... 49 Table 6. The 50 most retweeted tweets ............................................................................. 55 Table 7. The 50 most active memers ...............................................................................